Some online e-commerce systems or sites allow sellers to categorize the items offered for sale by the sites. For example, a site may define a category “smartphones”, intended to be used for various mobile cellular phone computing devices. However, when generating a new listing, a seller may assign the listing to an inaccurate, mistaken, or otherwise improper category. For example, a seller of a smartphone cover may assign the listing to the “smartphones” category. Since a smartphone cover is not a smartphone, even though the listing may be related to smartphones, the category may be considered improper. These “miscategorized” listings can cause problems within the site. For example, when users of the site search or browse in under the “smartphones” category, these miscategorized items may appear and clutter the user's search with listings that are not smartphones. Further, in some categories, there may be many such miscategorized listings. If the search results are sorted by price, for example, all of the lower-cost, miscategorized smartphone covers may dominate the early results of the search, leading to user frustration with the search results. Further, these miscategorized items cause a technical problem with the e-commerce system, causing the site to scan, identify, and transmit over the Internet additional network traffic associated with the miscategorized items. As such, miscategorized items cause a computational and network bandwidth burden for the site, as well as users of the site.
The headings provided herein are merely for convenience and do not necessarily affect the scope or meaning of the terms used. Like numbers in the Figures indicate like components.